The Reign of Greed eBook

CHAPTER XXIV

DREAMS

Amor, que astro eres?

On the following day, Thursday, at the hour of sunset,
Isagani was walking along the beautiful promenade
of Maria Cristina in the direction of the Malecon
to keep an appointment which Paulita had that morning
given him. The young man had no doubt that they
were to talk about what had happened on the previous
night, and as he was determined to ask for an explanation,
and knew how proud and haughty she was, he foresaw
an estrangement. In view of this eventuality he
had brought with him the only two letters he had ever
received from Paulita, two scraps of paper, whereon
were merely a few hurriedly written lines with various
blots, but in an even handwriting, things that did
not prevent the enamored youth from preserving them
with more solicitude than if they had been the autographs
of Sappho and the Muse Polyhymnia.

This decision to sacrifice his love on the altar of
dignity, the consciousness of suffering in the discharge
of duty, did not prevent a profound melancholy from
taking possession of Isagani and brought back into
his mind the beautiful days, and nights more beautiful
still, when they had whispered sweet nothings through
the flowered gratings of the entresol, nothings that
to the youth took on such a character of seriousness
and importance that they seemed to him the only matters
worthy of meriting the attention of the most exalted
human understanding. He recalled the walks on
moonlit nights, the fair, the dark December mornings
after the mass of Nativity, the holy water that he
used to offer her, when she would thank him with a
look charged with a whole epic of love, both of them
trembling as their fingers touched. Heavy sighs,
like small rockets, issued from his breast and brought
back to him all the verses, all the sayings of poets
and writers about the inconstancy of woman. Inwardly
he cursed the creation of theaters, the French operetta,
and vowed to get revenge on Pelaez at the first opportunity.
Everything about him appeared under the saddest and
somberest colors: the bay, deserted and solitary,
seemed more solitary still on account of the few steamers
that were anchored in it; the sun was dying behind
Mariveles without poetry or enchantment, without the
capricious and richly tinted clouds of happier evenings;
the Anda monument, in bad taste, mean and squat, without
style, without grandeur, looked like a lump of ice-cream
or at best a chunk of cake; the people who were promenading
along the Malecon, in spite of their complacent and
contented air, appeared distant, haughty, and vain;
mischievous and bad-mannered, the boys that played
on the beach, skipping flat stones over the surface
of the water or searching in the sand for mollusks
and crustaceans which they caught for the mere fun
of catching and killed without benefit to themselves;
in short, even the eternal port works to which he
had dedicated more than three odes, looked to him
absurd, ridiculous child’s play.